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'Protocols of Zion' Originated in Novel

It is true, as you say in ''The Infamous 'Protocols of Zion' Endures'' (Week in Review, July 26), that the ''Protocols'' emerged, perhaps as a forgery of the Imperial Russian secret police, around 1905, and that versions of them circulated widely in Europe, Britain and the United States. But they were not initially the product of a ''conspiracy theory that was invented in France almost a century ago'' or ''concocted around the turn of the century by anti-Semitic Russians in Paris.''

The original text of the ''Protocols'' appeared in 1868 in the first volume of a German novel, ''Biarritz,'' by Herrmann Goedsche, who wrote under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe. Goedsche, who had close connections to the Berlin royal court, was the author of very popular and long-enduring sensationalist novels of current events, written in the interest of reactionary politics.

In a clandestinely witnessed scene in the novel, the representatives of the 12 Tribes of Israel along with the Wandering Jew meet secretly in the Jewish cemetery of Prague in 1860, as they do once every century, to plot the subversion of the dominant order by taking over international finance and supporting all liberal and progressive causes.

It would be helpful and important, if every time a version of the ''Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' resurfaced, it were recalled that their origin was in a novel. For at the outset they were not a hoax but a fiction, the product of a perverse and meretricious imagination. In the Goedsche version, there was not even any serious pretense to realistic representation, as anyone who reads it could verify. JEFFREY L. SAMMONS Professor of German, Yale University New Haven, July 26, 1987

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A version of this letter appears in print on August 7, 1987, on Page A00030 of the National edition with the headline: 'Protocols of Zion' Originated in Novel. Today's Paper|Subscribe